Design Research

I believe Design Research is important to help understanding user’s need and to validate design concepts.

After we have identified the current user experience model and the ideal user experience, it will bring clarity to the vision for the product.

Business opportunities and strategies will have a higher successful rate with the help of design research. It also provided information to help prioritizing design scenario for the development cycle.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming exercise always helps me to bring a fresh new eye to the design problem, and bring new possibilities to my concepts.

Affinity exercise and mind mapping are some of the tools I like to conduct with my team to help capturing ideas, and bring clarity to design priority to cross team members.

Competitive Analysis

Competitive Analysis helps to better understand our target audience and get first hand insights on the experience.

Keeping updated with the latest trends and development is also important for a designer.

Storyboarding

Storyboarding would be used to help communicate design vision to audiences from different discipline. It helps the audience to visualize UX scenarios in contextual settings.

Wire frames

Wireframe is used to illustrate ideas and interaction flow in user scenarios. Wireframe diagrams are used to focus on the interaction flow, rather than the visual details of the final product.

Level of details needed in the wireframe may varies depending on the product development cycle and how they are being used.

Design Analysis

Analysis is used to help communicate design ideas and the reasons behind it. Usually design options are proposed and the pros and cons for each option is discussed. Feedback will be collected and concerns are addressed in the final design proposal.

Design Documentation

I believe design analysis and specification should be well documented and easily accessible to the product team.

It is important to share the design vision and reasons why we want to get things done in certain way.

It will help to minimize miscommunication and improve the time efficiency of bug fixes in the later stage of the development.